sign read) and went to see a Comanche Indian who sells roots from a nearby Cherokee reservation. At other times, he might meet with a park inspector, a buyer from Hong Kong, or a former cabdriver from QIeens who grows gin- seng for the New Age market. ("The plants come to you in dreams," he says.) Every year, Bowkley sees more newcom- ers in the woods: hippies, vegans, and urban refugees; bankers and brokers from Raleigh and Atlanta come to buy land and live in their dream houses- if only for a week or two a year. Rathbone wasn't one of those people. When we drove up to his house, the old man was hunched over his driveway in rumpled overalls, cracking black walnuts with a hammer. The air was acrid with the scent of burning timber-more than sixteen hundred acres were on fue by then, less than twenty miles away. But Rathbone didn't seem to mind. He led us across the yard, past bandy-legged chickens and dismantled satellite dishes ("I don't fool with them no more"), and waved us toward some crippled furniture on the front porch. He lowered his long, creaky frame onto a half-gutted couch, picked up a bowl of walnut pieces, and began to claw absent-mindedly at the shells. Mter a moment, he glanced over at Bowkley a little sheepisW "I ain't got nothin' for you today, Ray," he said. I t was a familiar story: The late fall IS usually Bowldey's best season, as diggers unload their stash in time for Christmas. But more and more diggers had little or nothing to seillatel Some were waiting for the market to heat up again-Bowkley's prices were down to two hundred and twenty-five dollars a pound, because his Asian buyers, fearing a ban on wild ginseng, had stockpiled too much root. But he also worried that other buyers might be stealing his cli- ents. Like most things that thrive on faith, the ginseng business is riven with paranoia. Diggers trade tales of buy- ers rigging their scales; buyers grumble about diggers substituting cultivated roots for wild ones. The one possibil- ity that no one wants to admit, at least within earshot of the press or the Park Service, is that there just isn't much gin- seng around. The American-ginseng belt stretches from Maine to Alabama and from New York to Oklahoma, but a good plant has 42 THE NEW YOR.KER., JULY 15,2002 always been hard to find. Ginseng tends to send up slender prongs and spade- shaped leaves only on shady; north-facing slopes with deep, loamy soil. It's finicky about rainfall and calcium content, and prey to all manner of pests and fungi. William Byrd, the eighteenth-century Virginia planter and satirist, liked to chew on a ginseng root whenever he went for a stroll. "It chears the Heart even of a Man that has a bad Wife," he wrote, but grows "as sparingly as Truth & Public Spirit." If American ginseng is worth digging at all, it's only because Asian ginseng is even scarcer. Already; by Byrd's time, the plant had been so overharvested in China that the emperor had to send an army into the mountains every year to find a handful of roots, and in Japan a ginseng habit was a sure road to ruinous debt. 'Mer ginseng," the saying went, "death by hanging." In 1716, when aJesuit mis- sionary found ginseng near Montreal, Asian buyers quickly cornered the mar- ket for it. A pound could be worth two days' wages to a digger and ten times as much to a trader, and the insatiable de- mand helped shape the settling of the New World. In the seventeen-eighties, New York's Astor family launched its fortunes with a boatload of ginseng bound for China. Soon after, Daniel Boone brought fifteen tons of it up the Ohio River, only to have his boat over- turn. Within a year, he was back with another load. To spare themselves a trek into wil- derness, some colonists inevitably tried farming ginseng. But it wasn't until the eighteen-eighties that a retired New York tinsmith named George Stanton per- fected a method using wooden screens to simulate forest shade. The ensuing gin- seng boom launched the careers of some five thousand ginseng farmers-and probably just as many poachers. "My people tried to persuade me to give up," a Virginian named L. J. Wilson wrote in 1909, after his ginseng farm was raided four times in one year. "But I told them no, I would gIve the next ten years of my life and every cent I could make, or I would catch the rascal." Wilson went on to conceal shotguns around his garden, attaching their triggers to trip wires. When the thieves, Millard and Rue Collins, returned, "Millard came in con- tact with one of the fine wires and was Instantly killed,"Wilson wrote. "His peo- ple being a sorry low-down class they have never moved his remains, and he sleeps on there in peace, and my sleep is more peaceful, too, for I'm not afraid of my ginseng garden being robbed " any more. Ginseng farms, which are concen- trated in Wisconsin, Ontario, and Brit- ish Columbia, now produce ninety-five per cent of the American-ginseng crop, all but five per cent of which is exported to East Asia. The cultivated roots are fatter and sleeker than their wild-man cousins. They are dried, ground up, sold in Caplets, and taken to relieve stress or to boost the immune system, alleviate diabetes, or sharpen the mind. But the more generic the powder, the more du- bious are its effects. When Consumer Re- ports tested ginseng products several years ago, it was found that the amount of active ingredients they contained, a family of compounds known as "gin- senosides," varied by nearly five thou- sand per cent. The Chinese much prefer whole roots, which they separate into more than forty grades. They believe that the most potent roots are wild, and also more than twenty years old. Yet even these roots are an unproven medi- cine. Studies have shown that ginseng can, among other things, reduce blood- sugar levels, inhibit the proliferation of cancer cells, and dramatically improve the sex lives of rats. It's just not clear whether any of these effects are strong enough to warrant taking the root in any form. "Ginseng's use as a cure-all makes it hard to find endpoints to measure," Mark Blumenthal, the founder and ex- ecutive director of the American Botan- ical Council, says. "Frankly, I don't really know whether I'm getting a discernible effect or not." For now, ginseng's popu- larity is best justified by an unwritten law of ethnobotany: a billion Chinese can't be wrong, especially if a million Native Americans back them up. Here, then, is the dilemma: the de-